8 ms·

Confessions of a $20K bootcamp graduate

87 points by makinori 10y ago

smt88 10y ago
Thank you for sharing this. There needs to be a better system for bootcamp shoppers, but until then, these kinds of posts will probably save others lots of money.
- ChuckFrank 10y ago
  I agree.
matt_wulfeck 10y ago
The money is always in selling the shovel, not digging.
jtchang 10y ago
This is a great post and more of these are surely needed. I think the reason we don't see many graduates speaking out is because they feel it might "de-value" their degree which I totally understand. However the lack of transparency with bootcamps is frightening. Especially regarding how much they charge. I'm not saying all of them are bad. In fact I think it is refreshing to that so many bootcamps popped up since now you have a lot of options. However there doesn't seem to be a lot of price warring yet which I find kind of odd.
- seangrogg 10y ago
  The weird thing is that the "price warring" that does go on seems very dramatic - there are plenty of bootcamps that are effectively "free". That being said, they often don't get rave reviews (nor do they seem to have much marketing going for them).
just_aint_right 10y ago
I went to a bootcamp in 2014. I think it was detrimental. I came out of it depressed and wholly unequipped for the roles their marketing suggested I'd be ready for. I don't recommend them.
49531 10y ago
Honestly I feel like the golden age of bootcamps is coming to an end. A lot of schools jumped into the market and it just seems like quality is dropping. Having worked at a bootcamp as an instructor and having hired multiple bootcamp grads I've noticed that typically you'll have 2 or 3 really great students and then 20 who got little value from the program. Bootcamps work wonders for that small percentage of students though. A lot of people who had some pretty shitty career paths ended up going from $12.00/hr to $100,00/yr within a few years of the program. That's life changing; sadly it's the exception, not the rule.
- paulmd 10y ago
  I didn't have any ability to follow my students' earnings but that '2-3 really great students per class' also correlates with my experience TA'ing CS110 students.
  - flangloria 10y ago
    Exactly. I feel this is being overlooked a lot.
- CloudYeller 10y ago
  Yep. It makes sense though, if you were a cofounder at a bootcamp as of like 2-3 years ago, you went from struggling just to get students in the door, to showing the first 2-300 students your passion and teaching skills and delighting in their successes, to earning millions, to having to worry about mitigating legal/financial risks, to delegating lots of responsibilities and losing touch with the business. And now you're ready to move on with your life. Happens to every super successful small business owner that doesn't consciously try to prevent that from happening. So it's no surprise that HR and probably lots of other bootcamps aren't as great as they used to be.
aczerepinski 10y ago
Flatiron School was nothing like this. We had long lectures every day by a great senior-level dev, and then review sessions with recent grads later in the day. It was a really polished curriculum, and a great environment to work hard in. $20k is indeed expensive, but it's only money. I used to do something I didn't love for a living and now I get to write code. Life is short. I'm thankful bootcamps exist and there was a path for me to transition into a challenging, engaging career. I've been out for almost a year now. I hope they're still keeping the standards high.
- cwarrior 10y ago
  How much was the tuition at Flatiron?
  - aczerepinski 10y ago
    I think 15k plus living in NYC for a few months.
- gk1 10y ago
  > "$20k is indeed expensive, but it's only money." That is a very substantial amount of cash for most people. Not to mention the time commitment. (As you say, life is short.)
  - seangrogg 10y ago
    Eh, much cheaper than a $40,000 4-year commitment (from a public university, assuming $5,000 semesters - which is very lenient).
    - gk1 10y ago
      That's been brought up a few times in this thread. I don't think it's a fair comparison at all. You can borrow student loans for college, but the $20k comes out of pocket.
      - 10y ago
MattyRad 10y ago
$20,000 is about half of what my 4 year college education cost (although it's more expensive now, certainly). That seems incredibly expensive for a bootcamp. I'm obliged to ask what on earth that money is going towards, besides directly into somebody's pockets. > Another observation, most people who get in, are already qualified people, with top university degrees. I'm afraid to ask how large their student loans could be, this bootcamp included.
- ryanSrich 10y ago
  When did you graduate? Between 2009 and 2013 my college cost was roughly $40k per year. This was about the average for similar schools (RIT). My wife went to a small liberal arts school during the same time and spent roughly $50k per year. $20k seems like an incredible bargain, but my view is probably warped.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - hobolord 10y ago
    Canadian schools don't charge that much
  - MattyRad 10y ago
    2009-2013 as well, (accredited) state school (of which I am a resident), cost me a little less than $10,000 per year for a Computer Engineering degree. However, my junior year, engineering classes level 300 and above increased by 25%, continually increasing per year until they were 100% more expensive. I narrowly dodged that bullet. Perhaps the west coast is cheaper? $50,000 per year seems like lunacy to me.
- stevewilhelm 10y ago
  UC Davis tuition is currently $14,046 a year.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
shawndrost 10y ago
(I'm a cofounder at Hack Reactor.) It's always a bummer when an alum would not recommend the program. I hate reading posts like this and I'd love to buy the poster a beer and learn more so we can do it different next time. (Email is in profile!) Here's a bit of inside baseball: This post is representative of a troubled period at our school. We had a couple of overlapping key problems and recent alums have been less supportive of the school. We care and we've made big moves to fix it. 1) Candidates were gaming the admissions process -> we rewrote it. 2) Students only had access to 2014 data and didn't know how it was calculated -> we published our 2015 data (and some stuff on 2016) and we published the world's first guide to "how to publish employment statistics that aren't bullshit", and we ramped up messaging to students "expect that your job search might be harder".[A] 3) Students stopped knowing who we were and stopped feeling like they could trust us -> we bought back two leaders to focus full-time on the campus (vs working at the umbrella organization). Lots of smaller changes as well. Even during this difficult period, students are generally having a great experience and getting an ROI that we are proud of. Our most recent NPS measurements have all been above 80, which is bonkers. (This means that nearly everyone is a 9 or a 10 on a 1-10 scale of "how likely are you to recommend HR to a friend?") There are a lot of details in this post that I don't disagree with. Eg "Ironically the number of lectures drops dramatically after the first week." This is true and we tell students about it during w1. It's the correct design decision. Etc. For other students, those same details have added up to a different gestalt. We care and we try to fix things when things aren't adding up. The diagnosis is not linear (you can't just fix the problems that alums cite) but we listen and try to sort out the right decisions. I empathize with a lot of things going on and I want recent alums to know we care. I also think it's bonkers that our 98% placement rate in 2015 (94% in 3 months, ~85%ish in 3 months for one recent cohort) is being cited like it's weak sauce. That's a towering accomplishment of staggering magnitude in my books, and we charge $20k because the median student gets a ~$50k raise and we employ lots of staff to make that happen. <3, Shawn [A] http://www.hackreactor.com/student-outcomes http://www.hackreactor.com/student-outcomes, http://reactorcore.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/StandardStudentOutcomeMethodology.pdf http://reactorcore.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/StandardSt...
- ChristianGeek 10y ago
  Have you considered a career in politics?
seangrogg 10y ago
Eh, I had a much better experience. But I don't chalk up my success to HR's curriculum nearly as much as I do the people (though getting exposure to Node.js has been a huge aspect of my life). If you're going to any bootcamp/immersive and you're going for the curriculum all you're going to get out of it is the curriculum - which you could easily obtain from freecodecamp.com for... well... free. If you're going to go, you should be going for the people - your sprint partners, thesis groups, beer buddies, outcomes teams, tech leads, alumni network... that's what lasts after Hack Reactor and it yields dividends well beyond the (admittedly striking) sticker price.
- nbclark 10y ago
  Part of my concern with bootcamps is the sentiment expressed above that you need it to get exposure to some arbitrary technology. In my experience, the best indicator to success in an industry or technology is a desire to learn that technology. Not someone giving exposure. I a happy it is working out for you, but as Node falls out of fashion, it will be on you to learn the next wave.
  - seangrogg 10y ago
    I hate when people make the assumption that learning JavaScript is somehow a limiting factor. It hasn't stopped me from picking up Java, Ruby, Python, or PHP. I still have some trouble with Go structs and I still have some learning to do on Rust lifetimes... but seriously. What "next wave" of server application development does Node.js leave me so woefully unprepared to deal with? Are people really having issues marshalling JSON/XML or sending templates down the wire?
    - sportanova 10y ago
      haha seriously.. whether it's rails, larvel, express, play, or django it's all basically the same. let's not pretend like java is string theory
    - nbclark 10y ago
      Was not my intention to imply javascript was a limiting factor. Nor that web frameworks for python, java, ruby, etc. are all that different. My comment was simply challenging the thought that a bootcamp is necessary for being exposed to technology. There are plenty of free resources online from which to learn. If a bootcamp helps jumpstart that, great. But picking up the next framework (while similar) will require diving in on your own.
hoodoof 10y ago
This post reads like the author holds the school responsible for the students success. Programming does not work that way. You MUST make yourself successful. Even giving a minutes thought to a schools "result stats" entirely misses the point. Taking this to the next level, I don't think people should be paying to go to any sort of coding school. Spend the money on a second monitor and living expenses and sit at home and work on building something real. There is no better, quicker or more effective way to learn, and every bit of knowledge that you need is published on the Internet for free. Stop learning, start doing.
- seangrogg 10y ago
  Wait, I actually need to apply to jobs and sit through interviews before I receive my $100k+ comp package? Ugh, screw that...
- shoemai 10y ago
  I think this is a popular opinion that's just not realistic. There is a >0% of the population (much greater IMO) that is more productive learning in a structured environment. For those people there is an amount >0$ that they would be willing to pay for that structured environment. To say otherwise is basically just a glib, "Well I did it so why can't you?"
  - hoodoof 10y ago
    There is no "structured environment" when you get a job in programming. You are given goals and you need to get the result through learning and problem solving and just trying to make the damn thing work. If the only context in which a person is capable of operating is one in which they are "taught" then they aren't suited to programming. You have to do it on your own eventually so many as well get started on the task of becoming good at that.
- ryanwaggoner 10y ago
  Come on, that totally ignores reality. Just because you eventually need to problem solve by yourself doesn't mean that you should shun any help or guidance or structured learning to get to where you CAN do that. I'm a self-taught developer. I learned to program the way that you did, it sounds like, by being curious and tinkering my way through, solving more and more complex problems. But guess what: that's not how many programmers learned, including some great ones. They went to a structured program and learned there. Where do you get this idea that real programmers are self-taught, so any structured learning is a waste? Every single online comment thread about coding bootcamps that I've read has had comments from people with your perspective, so you're not alone. But they've also all had people who had no experience programming, went to a bootcamp, and now have good jobs that they enjoy. I know multiple people like that myself...do you think they're all lying? Or maybe you think they must not be REAL programmers? Programming isn't magical. It's a skill, and just because we taught ourselves doesn't mean everyone has to.
devonharvey 10y ago
I attended Hack Reactor last summer. The teaching style she describes was incredibly effective for me, and I couldn't have been happier with my experience there. It doesn't take long to pay off $18k when you get a huge raise.
jstnjosepht 10y ago
I had a good experience at MakerSqaure. I wouldn't disagree with some of the points brought up - at certain times the work is more solo-based and I too wondered what the instructors were being paid for. The "best practices" point is something that could definitely be more emphasized from a curriculum standpoint. This is kinda tricky when talking about React (for example) as best practices in a lot of ways are still being adopted. In my case, the outcomes have been good (graduated earlier this year and make $20k more than my previous job) but I would agree that it's been an uphill battle getting an interview and negotiating salaries when there are more junior developers in the market. (HR/MKS markets grads as being more as "mid level" which is accurate for some - but it really is a spectrum.) Overall I recommend these programs to people who are passionate about the field - but a lot might be motivated to attend for the wrong reasons.
rm999 10y ago
I hire data scientists, my experience interviewing through a boot camp for a year: the top 1-2 students in each class are great, the remaining 10-15 are anywhere from under-qualified to woefully unqualified. The one guy I hired from the bootcamp, easily the highest quality applicant from three classes we evaluated, told me he learned essentially nothing. He told me his teachers had no real qualifications or work experience. The students are charged 15K for 6 weeks, about the same amount I spent on my entire masters. We were charged 10K to hire him. Bootcamps are a good idea in theory, but the execution makes it clear most of them are cash grabs and part of a disturbing culture in this country to massively profit off post secondary school education (at the expense of the students).
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
  > The students are charged 15K for 6 weeks, about the same amount I spent on my entire masters. Assuming you're going for a job, paying $X to get a job in six weeks sounds like much better value than paying $X to get a job in two years.
  - yompers888 10y ago
    I think parent comment is suggesting a greater value because 15k bought him a whole year or two of supervised self-improvement, whereas it lasts only 6 weeks in the boot camp environment.
    - rm999 10y ago
      Yes exactly. I only brought up the money to transition to my rant about how I think bootcamps are a cash grab :) I also think thaumasiotes is missing my overarching point, which is that the data science bootcamps didn't actually provide much value to their students.
daxfohl 10y ago
As an employer I'd look at bootcamp participation as a sign that the applicant doesn't know how to program. Just like all of Sun's nee Oracle's and MS's (well, and Oracle's) cert programs 15 years ago. If you truly don't know how to program but want a coding job, then here's a $0 class. Start with JavaScript. Why? The entire internet is based on JavaScript, it can do anything, it runs on any OS, and it's easy to learn. Google how to write a "hello world" web server program in node.js. (js stands for JavaScript. node.js is the most popular way to write web server in JavaScript). Follow that tutorial through. Next, update it to make it tell the current time, updating once per second. Make a client-side and a server-side version of the app. Client-side means your code is in the HTML page and gets executed by the browser. Server-side means the code is on the web server, and your browser pings the server once per second for the correct time. Server-side is a bit more complex. Google is your friend in this. stackoverflow.com is a great community and resource to learn from (but search for existing answers before asking questions!). Next step is to find a TodoMVC tutorial (google again) in node.js, follow it through, and publish to heroku. You probably want to google "node.js todomvc heroku tutorial". (I didn't but I'm sure something would turn up). This will teach you about databases, version control (specifically "git"), hosting, and deployment. At the end of the day you'll have fully functional web app that anyone can use just by knowing the URL! Really once you've worked through that, or, once you're able to do it from scratch without googling much, you're a coder. Rejoice. At that point put your TodoMVC code on github (google again, but the place people share code via "the git"), and start mucking with it. Whatever suits your fancy: if you're into UX then spend time making the UX cleaner. If you're into databases or programming languages, adapt to different ones. If you're into performance, then blaze that path. Or if you're just not into todo lists, then use your newfound knowledge to start a project WRT something you do like. Final step, ping potential employers and show off your github account. You'll certainly get a look from SMB owners who are looking for people with some intrinsic motivation. You'll put people who subcontract their drive to bootcamp programs to shame.
- CloudYeller 10y ago
  Given the volume of applicants you have to sift through, I don't blame you for generalizing that "bootcamp == noob". I know several people who had a CS degree and/or had been working as actual "Software Engineer"s for fairly reputable companies before attending a bootcamp. For people like this, there are several reasons to attend: 1) The same kind of reason why people do MBA's: you get a mental break, in that you do something very different than what you're used to doing, and then probably get to work in a more desirable city/company. 2) To learn things that were not taught in a CS program. At least as of 3-4 years ago, most CS programs did not teach you any kind of web development-- if you're lucky, there was a class on the LAMP stack, or you could do an independent project using whatever stack you wanted. Otherwise it was Java/C++ for data structures & algorithms. Going from that, to webapp development, can leave you feeling like you have no idea what you're doing. Especially if your coworkers aren't nice enough to help you out. 3) To meet technical cofounders. It sounds like nowadays some programs are basically letting in anyone with a heartbeat, but a few years ago at least, before bootcamps became "cool" or whatever, they attracted highly motivated risk-takers, many of whom had prior programming experience.
dan-b 10y ago
Drills, close quarters, hard work sounds like boot camp. App academy changed my life. "Anyone who tries for 6 months can get a job" really? You think that education is expensive? How much did you spend at college, and what job were you qualified for after that?
markbnj 10y ago
Ugh, how could anyone hope to teach programming by beginning with "Data Modeling and Classes?" That stuff only becomes interesting after you've become enthralled by getting the computer to do stuff.
- rdiddly 10y ago
  I thought the same thing - weird way to start off.
mageemooney 10y ago
Full disclosure: I am part of the instruction team at Hack Reactor. This amazing team that I work with are completely committed to our students, their experience and their success. I have colleagues who almost don't go home, who work weekends, obsess over how to help our students succeed. We lose sleep. We worry. Truth is, I find the tone of this article dismaying knowing what these remarkable people do for our students and knowing how successful most of those students go on to be. Shawn responds with some details about recent changes we had to make to address, among other things, applicants figuring out how to game our admissions. For a few cycles there were notably more students than usual who struggled with the program, not getting out of it what other students do and who subsequently struggled in the job search. That placed a huge demand on instructional resources which has impact throughout the student body. Whether those students got in by deliberate exploitation of vulnerabilities in our process (some did) or earnestly researching what HR wants and studying "to the exam" is immaterial -- they entered unprepared for the program. Regardless, they received the same world-class curriculum as our phenomenally successful students. I don't believe it's coincidental that the most vindictive account of a student's experience at Hack Reactor came hot on the heels of that challenging period in our history. I do want to address a few assertions that were made that suggest a deliberate attempt to mislead readers. The Hackers In Residence are not Instructors at Hack Reactor. They aren't represented as such. HIR's are not intended to be experts in technology nor to provide answers to all possible questions the current students provide. Any instruction they provide is either ad-hoc coaching, whiteboarding collaboration, in the form of brown bag talks they offer or by presenting toy problem solutions in the morning. What they are is a group of very gifted and empathetic engineers who are sharing their talents with other students, coaching them through problem solving, providing first line Help Desk support, pitching in on other efforts at the school while they continue their own studies beyond the scope of our curriculum. They are among our brightest students who choose not to go immediately into the job market where they can command impressive salaries but rather stay to learn and study more and to support other students. They're fabulous, talented people. More specifically, HIR's are recent grads who understand the experience of the current students and who know from direct recent experience the kinds of support they found most helpful or most hoped for and seek to provide that support to students. Questions that are beyond the scope of their understanding are escalated to engineers (like me) on the Instruction Team. They are an additional set of eyes and ears that allow me to even more insight into the experience of my current students than I can gain on my own. As to the lectures and the difference between the first half and the second half of the program. The curriculum is very specifically designed to develop autonomous engineers. It is WHY our grads are successful. They don't excel in the workplace IN SPITE OF that structure. We guide them more early in the program where they need more support and very consciously, over time, reduce the hand-holding in favor of their own discovery and collaborating with classmates to learn. Mentors and Lecturers continue to provide support and instruction as needed during the latter half of the program. With respect to languages. Many schools teach more than one language. Not many schools prepare engineers as well as we do. Hack Reactor is not a Javascript school. We use Javascript as a context to teach software engineering. Our students often tackle new languages on their own in the second half because they are well-prepared and appropriately autonomous. We've had students and student teams use Swift, Python, Ruby on Rails, Rust, Processing, dabble in IoT, ... And HIRs tackle Scala, Haskell, and more. That's not in spite of the program, that's because of the program.. I understand that a critical reader will have to take my response with a grain of salt but I think it's reasonable to ask readers of the Medium article to do their own research and contact alums for direct feedback before drawing conclusions.
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sixtypoundhound 10y ago
Ouch! As a hiring manager, the "Javascript only" model is a serious roadblock. Nothing against node.js, but a candidate would be marketable to a broader range of shops if the program gave them a basic grounding in Python and SQL. Python is well accepted for both web servers and sysadmin type scripting. SQL is the most common choice for databases. I don't think either one would be a incremental burden and would really open up the number of potential employers for the grads.
- seangrogg 10y ago
  Out of curiosity, what kind of scripts can you write in Python that you cannot in Node.js? Don't get me wrong, Python is great and has a number of really great number crunching libraries just a pip away, but if all you're doing is developing web apps and hashing out some scripts via the terminal... they'll need to know JavaScript for the client - but do they really need to come away with two languages after 3 months?
- davegonzalez 10y ago
  "a candidate would be marketable to a broader range of shops if the program gave them a basic grounding in #{LANGUAGE} and #{DB}" Seems like people fail to realize that the language is the medium through which they teach concepts (algorithms, data structures, etc). I'm an HR06 grad; we focused on fullstack Javascript, but that hasn't stopped me from working in Ruby/Rails, or more recently, Go. Beyond that, we did actually have lectures/sprints on MySql, Postgresql and Mongodb. Not sure if that's changed at all.
flangloria 10y ago
This maybe a bit off topic, but hopefully someone can provide some insight. Do Udacity nanodegrees fall under the same category as these bootcamps? What is the quality one can expect there?

87 points by makinori 10y ago

smt88 10y ago

Thank you for sharing this. There needs to be a better system for bootcamp shoppers, but until then, these kinds of posts will probably save others lots of money.

ChuckFrank 10y ago
I agree.

matt_wulfeck 10y ago

The money is always in selling the shovel, not digging.

jtchang 10y ago

This is a great post and more of these are surely needed. I think the reason we don't see many graduates speaking out is because they feel it might "de-value" their degree which I totally understand. However the lack of transparency with bootcamps is frightening. Especially regarding how much they charge. I'm not saying all of them are bad. In fact I think it is refreshing to that so many bootcamps popped up since now you have a lot of options. However there doesn't seem to be a lot of price warring yet which I find kind of odd.

seangrogg 10y ago
The weird thing is that the "price warring" that does go on seems very dramatic - there are plenty of bootcamps that are effectively "free". That being said, they often don't get rave reviews (nor do they seem to have much marketing going for them).

just_aint_right 10y ago

I went to a bootcamp in 2014. I think it was detrimental. I came out of it depressed and wholly unequipped for the roles their marketing suggested I'd be ready for. I don't recommend them.

49531 10y ago

Honestly I feel like the golden age of bootcamps is coming to an end. A lot of schools jumped into the market and it just seems like quality is dropping. Having worked at a bootcamp as an instructor and having hired multiple bootcamp grads I've noticed that typically you'll have 2 or 3 really great students and then 20 who got little value from the program. Bootcamps work wonders for that small percentage of students though. A lot of people who had some pretty shitty career paths ended up going from $12.00/hr to $100,00/yr within a few years of the program. That's life changing; sadly it's the exception, not the rule.

paulmd 10y ago
I didn't have any ability to follow my students' earnings but that '2-3 really great students per class' also correlates with my experience TA'ing CS110 students.
- flangloria 10y ago
  Exactly. I feel this is being overlooked a lot.
CloudYeller 10y ago
Yep. It makes sense though, if you were a cofounder at a bootcamp as of like 2-3 years ago, you went from struggling just to get students in the door, to showing the first 2-300 students your passion and teaching skills and delighting in their successes, to earning millions, to having to worry about mitigating legal/financial risks, to delegating lots of responsibilities and losing touch with the business. And now you're ready to move on with your life. Happens to every super successful small business owner that doesn't consciously try to prevent that from happening. So it's no surprise that HR and probably lots of other bootcamps aren't as great as they used to be.

aczerepinski 10y ago

Flatiron School was nothing like this. We had long lectures every day by a great senior-level dev, and then review sessions with recent grads later in the day. It was a really polished curriculum, and a great environment to work hard in. $20k is indeed expensive, but it's only money. I used to do something I didn't love for a living and now I get to write code. Life is short. I'm thankful bootcamps exist and there was a path for me to transition into a challenging, engaging career. I've been out for almost a year now. I hope they're still keeping the standards high.

cwarrior 10y ago
How much was the tuition at Flatiron?
- aczerepinski 10y ago
  I think 15k plus living in NYC for a few months.
gk1 10y ago
> "$20k is indeed expensive, but it's only money." That is a very substantial amount of cash for most people. Not to mention the time commitment. (As you say, life is short.)
- seangrogg 10y ago
  Eh, much cheaper than a $40,000 4-year commitment (from a public university, assuming $5,000 semesters - which is very lenient).
  - gk1 10y ago
    That's been brought up a few times in this thread. I don't think it's a fair comparison at all. You can borrow student loans for college, but the $20k comes out of pocket.
    - 10y ago

MattyRad 10y ago

$20,000 is about half of what my 4 year college education cost (although it's more expensive now, certainly). That seems incredibly expensive for a bootcamp. I'm obliged to ask what on earth that money is going towards, besides directly into somebody's pockets. > Another observation, most people who get in, are already qualified people, with top university degrees. I'm afraid to ask how large their student loans could be, this bootcamp included.

ryanSrich 10y ago
When did you graduate? Between 2009 and 2013 my college cost was roughly $40k per year. This was about the average for similar schools (RIT). My wife went to a small liberal arts school during the same time and spent roughly $50k per year. $20k seems like an incredible bargain, but my view is probably warped.
- deleted 10y ago
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- hobolord 10y ago
  Canadian schools don't charge that much
- MattyRad 10y ago
  2009-2013 as well, (accredited) state school (of which I am a resident), cost me a little less than $10,000 per year for a Computer Engineering degree. However, my junior year, engineering classes level 300 and above increased by 25%, continually increasing per year until they were 100% more expensive. I narrowly dodged that bullet. Perhaps the west coast is cheaper? $50,000 per year seems like lunacy to me.
stevewilhelm 10y ago
UC Davis tuition is currently $14,046 a year.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

shawndrost 10y ago

(I'm a cofounder at Hack Reactor.) It's always a bummer when an alum would not recommend the program. I hate reading posts like this and I'd love to buy the poster a beer and learn more so we can do it different next time. (Email is in profile!) Here's a bit of inside baseball: This post is representative of a troubled period at our school. We had a couple of overlapping key problems and recent alums have been less supportive of the school. We care and we've made big moves to fix it. 1) Candidates were gaming the admissions process -> we rewrote it. 2) Students only had access to 2014 data and didn't know how it was calculated -> we published our 2015 data (and some stuff on 2016) and we published the world's first guide to "how to publish employment statistics that aren't bullshit", and we ramped up messaging to students "expect that your job search might be harder".[A] 3) Students stopped knowing who we were and stopped feeling like they could trust us -> we bought back two leaders to focus full-time on the campus (vs working at the umbrella organization). Lots of smaller changes as well. Even during this difficult period, students are generally having a great experience and getting an ROI that we are proud of. Our most recent NPS measurements have all been above 80, which is bonkers. (This means that nearly everyone is a 9 or a 10 on a 1-10 scale of "how likely are you to recommend HR to a friend?") There are a lot of details in this post that I don't disagree with. Eg "Ironically the number of lectures drops dramatically after the first week." This is true and we tell students about it during w1. It's the correct design decision. Etc. For other students, those same details have added up to a different gestalt. We care and we try to fix things when things aren't adding up. The diagnosis is not linear (you can't just fix the problems that alums cite) but we listen and try to sort out the right decisions. I empathize with a lot of things going on and I want recent alums to know we care. I also think it's bonkers that our 98% placement rate in 2015 (94% in 3 months, ~85%ish in 3 months for one recent cohort) is being cited like it's weak sauce. That's a towering accomplishment of staggering magnitude in my books, and we charge $20k because the median student gets a ~$50k raise and we employ lots of staff to make that happen. <3, Shawn [A] http://www.hackreactor.com/student-outcomes http://www.hackreactor.com/student-outcomes, http://reactorcore.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/StandardStudentOutcomeMethodology.pdf http://reactorcore.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/StandardSt...

ChristianGeek 10y ago
Have you considered a career in politics?

seangrogg 10y ago

Eh, I had a much better experience. But I don't chalk up my success to HR's curriculum nearly as much as I do the people (though getting exposure to Node.js has been a huge aspect of my life). If you're going to any bootcamp/immersive and you're going for the curriculum all you're going to get out of it is the curriculum - which you could easily obtain from freecodecamp.com for... well... free. If you're going to go, you should be going for the people - your sprint partners, thesis groups, beer buddies, outcomes teams, tech leads, alumni network... that's what lasts after Hack Reactor and it yields dividends well beyond the (admittedly striking) sticker price.

nbclark 10y ago
Part of my concern with bootcamps is the sentiment expressed above that you need it to get exposure to some arbitrary technology. In my experience, the best indicator to success in an industry or technology is a desire to learn that technology. Not someone giving exposure. I a happy it is working out for you, but as Node falls out of fashion, it will be on you to learn the next wave.
- seangrogg 10y ago
  I hate when people make the assumption that learning JavaScript is somehow a limiting factor. It hasn't stopped me from picking up Java, Ruby, Python, or PHP. I still have some trouble with Go structs and I still have some learning to do on Rust lifetimes... but seriously. What "next wave" of server application development does Node.js leave me so woefully unprepared to deal with? Are people really having issues marshalling JSON/XML or sending templates down the wire?
  - sportanova 10y ago
    haha seriously.. whether it's rails, larvel, express, play, or django it's all basically the same. let's not pretend like java is string theory
  - nbclark 10y ago
    Was not my intention to imply javascript was a limiting factor. Nor that web frameworks for python, java, ruby, etc. are all that different. My comment was simply challenging the thought that a bootcamp is necessary for being exposed to technology. There are plenty of free resources online from which to learn. If a bootcamp helps jumpstart that, great. But picking up the next framework (while similar) will require diving in on your own.

hoodoof 10y ago

This post reads like the author holds the school responsible for the students success. Programming does not work that way. You MUST make yourself successful. Even giving a minutes thought to a schools "result stats" entirely misses the point. Taking this to the next level, I don't think people should be paying to go to any sort of coding school. Spend the money on a second monitor and living expenses and sit at home and work on building something real. There is no better, quicker or more effective way to learn, and every bit of knowledge that you need is published on the Internet for free. Stop learning, start doing.

seangrogg 10y ago
Wait, I actually need to apply to jobs and sit through interviews before I receive my $100k+ comp package? Ugh, screw that...
shoemai 10y ago
I think this is a popular opinion that's just not realistic. There is a >0% of the population (much greater IMO) that is more productive learning in a structured environment. For those people there is an amount >0$ that they would be willing to pay for that structured environment. To say otherwise is basically just a glib, "Well I did it so why can't you?"
- hoodoof 10y ago
  There is no "structured environment" when you get a job in programming. You are given goals and you need to get the result through learning and problem solving and just trying to make the damn thing work. If the only context in which a person is capable of operating is one in which they are "taught" then they aren't suited to programming. You have to do it on your own eventually so many as well get started on the task of becoming good at that.
ryanwaggoner 10y ago
Come on, that totally ignores reality. Just because you eventually need to problem solve by yourself doesn't mean that you should shun any help or guidance or structured learning to get to where you CAN do that. I'm a self-taught developer. I learned to program the way that you did, it sounds like, by being curious and tinkering my way through, solving more and more complex problems. But guess what: that's not how many programmers learned, including some great ones. They went to a structured program and learned there. Where do you get this idea that real programmers are self-taught, so any structured learning is a waste? Every single online comment thread about coding bootcamps that I've read has had comments from people with your perspective, so you're not alone. But they've also all had people who had no experience programming, went to a bootcamp, and now have good jobs that they enjoy. I know multiple people like that myself...do you think they're all lying? Or maybe you think they must not be REAL programmers? Programming isn't magical. It's a skill, and just because we taught ourselves doesn't mean everyone has to.

devonharvey 10y ago

I attended Hack Reactor last summer. The teaching style she describes was incredibly effective for me, and I couldn't have been happier with my experience there. It doesn't take long to pay off $18k when you get a huge raise.

jstnjosepht 10y ago

I had a good experience at MakerSqaure. I wouldn't disagree with some of the points brought up - at certain times the work is more solo-based and I too wondered what the instructors were being paid for. The "best practices" point is something that could definitely be more emphasized from a curriculum standpoint. This is kinda tricky when talking about React (for example) as best practices in a lot of ways are still being adopted. In my case, the outcomes have been good (graduated earlier this year and make $20k more than my previous job) but I would agree that it's been an uphill battle getting an interview and negotiating salaries when there are more junior developers in the market. (HR/MKS markets grads as being more as "mid level" which is accurate for some - but it really is a spectrum.) Overall I recommend these programs to people who are passionate about the field - but a lot might be motivated to attend for the wrong reasons.

rm999 10y ago

I hire data scientists, my experience interviewing through a boot camp for a year: the top 1-2 students in each class are great, the remaining 10-15 are anywhere from under-qualified to woefully unqualified. The one guy I hired from the bootcamp, easily the highest quality applicant from three classes we evaluated, told me he learned essentially nothing. He told me his teachers had no real qualifications or work experience. The students are charged 15K for 6 weeks, about the same amount I spent on my entire masters. We were charged 10K to hire him. Bootcamps are a good idea in theory, but the execution makes it clear most of them are cash grabs and part of a disturbing culture in this country to massively profit off post secondary school education (at the expense of the students).

thaumasiotes 10y ago
> The students are charged 15K for 6 weeks, about the same amount I spent on my entire masters. Assuming you're going for a job, paying $X to get a job in six weeks sounds like much better value than paying $X to get a job in two years.
- yompers888 10y ago
  I think parent comment is suggesting a greater value because 15k bought him a whole year or two of supervised self-improvement, whereas it lasts only 6 weeks in the boot camp environment.
  - rm999 10y ago
    Yes exactly. I only brought up the money to transition to my rant about how I think bootcamps are a cash grab :) I also think thaumasiotes is missing my overarching point, which is that the data science bootcamps didn't actually provide much value to their students.

daxfohl 10y ago

As an employer I'd look at bootcamp participation as a sign that the applicant doesn't know how to program. Just like all of Sun's nee Oracle's and MS's (well, and Oracle's) cert programs 15 years ago. If you truly don't know how to program but want a coding job, then here's a $0 class. Start with JavaScript. Why? The entire internet is based on JavaScript, it can do anything, it runs on any OS, and it's easy to learn. Google how to write a "hello world" web server program in node.js. (js stands for JavaScript. node.js is the most popular way to write web server in JavaScript). Follow that tutorial through. Next, update it to make it tell the current time, updating once per second. Make a client-side and a server-side version of the app. Client-side means your code is in the HTML page and gets executed by the browser. Server-side means the code is on the web server, and your browser pings the server once per second for the correct time. Server-side is a bit more complex. Google is your friend in this. stackoverflow.com is a great community and resource to learn from (but search for existing answers before asking questions!). Next step is to find a TodoMVC tutorial (google again) in node.js, follow it through, and publish to heroku. You probably want to google "node.js todomvc heroku tutorial". (I didn't but I'm sure something would turn up). This will teach you about databases, version control (specifically "git"), hosting, and deployment. At the end of the day you'll have fully functional web app that anyone can use just by knowing the URL! Really once you've worked through that, or, once you're able to do it from scratch without googling much, you're a coder. Rejoice. At that point put your TodoMVC code on github (google again, but the place people share code via "the git"), and start mucking with it. Whatever suits your fancy: if you're into UX then spend time making the UX cleaner. If you're into databases or programming languages, adapt to different ones. If you're into performance, then blaze that path. Or if you're just not into todo lists, then use your newfound knowledge to start a project WRT something you do like. Final step, ping potential employers and show off your github account. You'll certainly get a look from SMB owners who are looking for people with some intrinsic motivation. You'll put people who subcontract their drive to bootcamp programs to shame.

CloudYeller 10y ago
Given the volume of applicants you have to sift through, I don't blame you for generalizing that "bootcamp == noob". I know several people who had a CS degree and/or had been working as actual "Software Engineer"s for fairly reputable companies before attending a bootcamp. For people like this, there are several reasons to attend: 1) The same kind of reason why people do MBA's: you get a mental break, in that you do something very different than what you're used to doing, and then probably get to work in a more desirable city/company. 2) To learn things that were not taught in a CS program. At least as of 3-4 years ago, most CS programs did not teach you any kind of web development-- if you're lucky, there was a class on the LAMP stack, or you could do an independent project using whatever stack you wanted. Otherwise it was Java/C++ for data structures & algorithms. Going from that, to webapp development, can leave you feeling like you have no idea what you're doing. Especially if your coworkers aren't nice enough to help you out. 3) To meet technical cofounders. It sounds like nowadays some programs are basically letting in anyone with a heartbeat, but a few years ago at least, before bootcamps became "cool" or whatever, they attracted highly motivated risk-takers, many of whom had prior programming experience.

dan-b 10y ago

Drills, close quarters, hard work sounds like boot camp. App academy changed my life. "Anyone who tries for 6 months can get a job" really? You think that education is expensive? How much did you spend at college, and what job were you qualified for after that?

markbnj 10y ago

Ugh, how could anyone hope to teach programming by beginning with "Data Modeling and Classes?" That stuff only becomes interesting after you've become enthralled by getting the computer to do stuff.

rdiddly 10y ago
I thought the same thing - weird way to start off.

mageemooney 10y ago

Full disclosure: I am part of the instruction team at Hack Reactor. This amazing team that I work with are completely committed to our students, their experience and their success. I have colleagues who almost don't go home, who work weekends, obsess over how to help our students succeed. We lose sleep. We worry. Truth is, I find the tone of this article dismaying knowing what these remarkable people do for our students and knowing how successful most of those students go on to be. Shawn responds with some details about recent changes we had to make to address, among other things, applicants figuring out how to game our admissions. For a few cycles there were notably more students than usual who struggled with the program, not getting out of it what other students do and who subsequently struggled in the job search. That placed a huge demand on instructional resources which has impact throughout the student body. Whether those students got in by deliberate exploitation of vulnerabilities in our process (some did) or earnestly researching what HR wants and studying "to the exam" is immaterial -- they entered unprepared for the program. Regardless, they received the same world-class curriculum as our phenomenally successful students. I don't believe it's coincidental that the most vindictive account of a student's experience at Hack Reactor came hot on the heels of that challenging period in our history. I do want to address a few assertions that were made that suggest a deliberate attempt to mislead readers. The Hackers In Residence are not Instructors at Hack Reactor. They aren't represented as such. HIR's are not intended to be experts in technology nor to provide answers to all possible questions the current students provide. Any instruction they provide is either ad-hoc coaching, whiteboarding collaboration, in the form of brown bag talks they offer or by presenting toy problem solutions in the morning. What they are is a group of very gifted and empathetic engineers who are sharing their talents with other students, coaching them through problem solving, providing first line Help Desk support, pitching in on other efforts at the school while they continue their own studies beyond the scope of our curriculum. They are among our brightest students who choose not to go immediately into the job market where they can command impressive salaries but rather stay to learn and study more and to support other students. They're fabulous, talented people. More specifically, HIR's are recent grads who understand the experience of the current students and who know from direct recent experience the kinds of support they found most helpful or most hoped for and seek to provide that support to students. Questions that are beyond the scope of their understanding are escalated to engineers (like me) on the Instruction Team. They are an additional set of eyes and ears that allow me to even more insight into the experience of my current students than I can gain on my own. As to the lectures and the difference between the first half and the second half of the program. The curriculum is very specifically designed to develop autonomous engineers. It is WHY our grads are successful. They don't excel in the workplace IN SPITE OF that structure. We guide them more early in the program where they need more support and very consciously, over time, reduce the hand-holding in favor of their own discovery and collaborating with classmates to learn. Mentors and Lecturers continue to provide support and instruction as needed during the latter half of the program. With respect to languages. Many schools teach more than one language. Not many schools prepare engineers as well as we do. Hack Reactor is not a Javascript school. We use Javascript as a context to teach software engineering. Our students often tackle new languages on their own in the second half because they are well-prepared and appropriately autonomous. We've had students and student teams use Swift, Python, Ruby on Rails, Rust, Processing, dabble in IoT, ... And HIRs tackle Scala, Haskell, and more. That's not in spite of the program, that's because of the program.. I understand that a critical reader will have to take my response with a grain of salt but I think it's reasonable to ask readers of the Medium article to do their own research and contact alums for direct feedback before drawing conclusions.

deleted 10y ago

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sixtypoundhound 10y ago

Ouch! As a hiring manager, the "Javascript only" model is a serious roadblock. Nothing against node.js, but a candidate would be marketable to a broader range of shops if the program gave them a basic grounding in Python and SQL. Python is well accepted for both web servers and sysadmin type scripting. SQL is the most common choice for databases. I don't think either one would be a incremental burden and would really open up the number of potential employers for the grads.

seangrogg 10y ago
Out of curiosity, what kind of scripts can you write in Python that you cannot in Node.js? Don't get me wrong, Python is great and has a number of really great number crunching libraries just a pip away, but if all you're doing is developing web apps and hashing out some scripts via the terminal... they'll need to know JavaScript for the client - but do they really need to come away with two languages after 3 months?
davegonzalez 10y ago
"a candidate would be marketable to a broader range of shops if the program gave them a basic grounding in #{LANGUAGE} and #{DB}" Seems like people fail to realize that the language is the medium through which they teach concepts (algorithms, data structures, etc). I'm an HR06 grad; we focused on fullstack Javascript, but that hasn't stopped me from working in Ruby/Rails, or more recently, Go. Beyond that, we did actually have lectures/sprints on MySql, Postgresql and Mongodb. Not sure if that's changed at all.

flangloria 10y ago

This maybe a bit off topic, but hopefully someone can provide some insight. Do Udacity nanodegrees fall under the same category as these bootcamps? What is the quality one can expect there?